Edgar Doctorow - All the Time in the World

AFTER THE NIGHT AT LEON’S, Borislav’s restaurant with its dark furniture and thick carpets and red velvet drapes and amateur paintings seemed to Ramon unforgivably tacky. Yet working the same room with Jelena, doing the same thing at the same time, gave him a feeling of being home. And now he regretted bragging to her about what an independent person he was, with his uncompromising values. The truth was that Leon had seen him through four years at City College. And neither did this life he had drifted into have anything to do with values. He had felt restless, with only a vague ambition to make films, and gripped with a kind of wanderlust, though he had not wandered farther than Brooklyn. He’d gotten off the El one day when the sun shone in the window. It seemed to him a different light here than you had in Manhattan. He walked around and found sand in the streets and here and there a trace of a trolley track in the worn-out concrete. By and by, he came to the beachfront. The air was fresh, gulls rode the breezes, and Ramon felt unaccustomedly at peace in the wind-buffered sun with the blue seawater in his eyes. This feeling stayed with him as he wandered back into a local business district and saw the sign in Borislav’s window: DISHWASH IS WANTED. He liked that locution, suggestive of a foreign tongue, and so he walked in and become a dishwash, only to rise to busboy, waiter, and married man.

THEN CAME THE NIGHT that Borislav closed the restaurant to the public. Tables were pushed together, new linen was laid out, as well as cut-crystal glasses that Ramon had not seen before. A strange man arrived and strode into the kitchen. Jelena looked at Ramon in surprise, though Borislav, as well as his shrew of a wife, in a fancy dress and with her face made up, were clearly expecting this. He is the chef of this evening, Mrs. Borislav said. Ramon saw the chef’s imperious glance as he looked over the kitchen and the help, including the cooks. The chef shook his head in disapproval, then turned to Borislav and began giving orders.

The dinner party for which the entire restaurant had been reserved turned out to have just fourteen guests, all men. Apparently they liked a quiet room. Borislav had excused the staff for the evening, except for Ramon and Jelena. When Ramon began his service, with bottles of sparkling water, conversation stopped and a man at the head of the table looked at him. Ramon felt Borislav’s hand on his shoulder and heard his somewhat deferential voice saying, in its mouthful language, that the boy was okay because he was just a mestizo who didn’t understand a word — which Ramon, of course, understood, because the look he’d got from the head man and the jovially responsive voice of Borislav provided all the understanding necessary.

In the kitchen, Jelena was nervous. Before the guests had arrived she’d gone to the alley with her cell phone and a man standing there had told her to go back inside.

Ramon, you know what they are? she whispered. Do you realize?

She held out her hands and they were shaking. Ramon fingered her wedding ring. When had she got it? He couldn’t keep from smiling.

You’ve been cleared for the evening, Jelena. You are family. Just don’t look at them. Keep your eyes down and be your efficient self and everything will be all right.

How do you know to be so calm? Jelena said.

I am familiar with the species.

WHEN THE DINNER of the fourteen was over and the limos had driven off and the doors were closed for the night, Borislav and his wife poured themselves glasses of blackberry brandy and sat down in the back. A while later, the old lawyer was admitted and the three of them chatted softly, as if Ramon might overhear them. Jelena had gone home and Ramon was about to leave when Borislav called him to the table.

You did well, Ramon.

Thank you.

Sit, sit. The counsellor wants to speak with you.

The lawyer said, April fifteenth, as you know, is for paying taxes. As I suspect, your income is the poverty level?

Even counting tips, Ramon said.

You see how ungrateful? Mrs. Borislav said.

The lawyer continued, We assume the Immigration does not want Jelena, your wife, to be a ward of the state — this is their main concern for the green card, and so we are signing on Borislav, who is a man of substance, to be a co-sponsor of her.

Borislav nodded in solemn acknowledgment of his substance.

In that way, the Immigration is assured that Jelena does not apply for Welfare, though her husband is in the poverty class. And the arrangement is affirmed by Jelena living in the Borislav residence.

Okay with me, Ramon said, rising.

One moment. Since as marriage partners you are to file a joint tax return, you and Jelena together, for this is what married people do, we find it necessary that you live with Borislav as well, in his house, and therefore with the same address on the tax return.

Is it not my house also? Anya Borislav said to the lawyer.

Of course, the lawyer said. My apologies.

So let him be grateful to me as well. That we are giving the mestizo everything, including a roof over his head. But I tell you, she said to Ramon, this is not a hotel and I am not a maid. You understand? Your bed you will make yourself, your room you will clean, and your wash you will take to the Laundromat, and your food you will eat elsewhere.

Ramon ignored her. I have conditions, he said to the lawyer.

What conditions?

That the money I am owed is paid to me now.

Jelena has not been paying you? Borislav said.

No, nor have I asked her. She is my wife. Since we are married and filing a joint tax return it is not income if it is passed from one of us to the other. So I will need from you the money I’m owed before I consent to live in your house and suffer the insults of Mrs. Borislav.

At this the woman rose from the table and began to scream and curse in her native tongue. Spittle flew from her lips.

Borislav stood and tried to calm her but she pushed his arm away and screamed at him. Anya, he said, please, please. We know what we are doing!

It was that remark that Ramon remembered later. Borislav and the lawyer had agreed to pay him the money. But what was it, exactly, that they knew they were doing?

BORISLAV’S HOUSE WAS of red brick with a roof of green tile. It stood out in this neighborhood of small two-family homes on small lots. The inside reflected the same taste — probably Mrs. Borislav’s — as the restaurant: heavy, dark furniture, thick rugs, lamps with tasselled shades, and toylike things on every surface — things of glass, things of silver, things of ceramic, dancing ladies in swirling skirts, horses pulling sleighs. Only when Ramon had climbed the stairs to the third floor did he find a window that was not heavily curtained. His room was across the hall from Jelena’s. It was small with a narrow bed and a chest of drawers, but its window was covered only with a pull shade, and when that was rolled up the seaside morning light streamed in so that he awoke with the sun on his face.

In secret, of course, he was excited to be living so close to Jelena. When it came time to walk home after work, they had the same destination. He opened the door with her key and walked behind her up the stairs and said good night only when they stood at their doors. There was a bathroom, too, that they shared and so he got to know the products she used for her hair, her skin, her eyes. Her potions, creams, sprays, and soaps gave him a behind-the-scenes look at how she took care of herself. With respect, he always put the seat down. And so he felt in this illusion of their intimacy something more like the married state.

What puzzled him was her reaction to this closeness. He had expected her to object to having him as a housemate, and to be even angrier and more remote than before. But she was not. She was formal, perhaps, but no longer offhand in her treatment of him. She regarded him judiciously as he spoke to her. And when it became apparent that Mrs. Borislav regularly checked his room and went through the entire house to see if he had stolen anything, Jelena told him this would be unforgivable if the woman were sane. Anya Borislav, Jelena confided, is not a little crazy. I don’t know how Borislav endures her.